


A Year in the Life

by ignipes



Category: Stargate Atlantis, Supernatural
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-12-29
Updated: 2006-12-29
Packaged: 2017-10-03 03:08:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,245
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13522
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ignipes/pseuds/ignipes
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Crossover AU. John and Rodney are demon hunters. With rock salt and holy water and Latin rituals and everything.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Year in the Life

They met on April first.

_Figures_, John said later, after learning the hard way that Rodney believed in the value of automated, reloading, self-aiming, Rube Goldberg-esque crème-pie-throwing machines as anniversary gifts. _I should have known._

But he hadn't known, not about the pies or all the rest, when Ellen had gestured vaguely across the crowded roadhouse and said, "That's the guy."

"You're kidding me," John replied. Then: "Which one? The Lynyrd Skynyrd roadie or the Pillsbury Doughboy?"

Shoving a bottle of Bud Light into his hand, Ellen raised an eyebrow in that infuriating way she had and pointed again.

John took the beer without another word and obeyed. He had heard rumors about what happened to the men who disobeyed Ellen. There were a couple of guys, folks said, who never quite walked the same again.

-

"Well. It's okay, I guess."

"Not bad. Classic SS 454 package."

"Only 3,800 of these were made."

"Seven point four liter Turbo-Jet."

"Three hundred and sixty horsepower."

"Six hundred and seventy-eight Newton-meters of torque."

John turned on his heels and peered at Rodeny through his sunglasses. "McKay. Who the hell measures engine torque in Newton-meters?"

Rodney bristled. "That's the proper SI unit."

"You can't use SI units on a car like this," John protested, mildly horrified. "That's like... that's like playing cricket on the Fourth of July."

Rodney waved his hand dismissively and took a few steps forward. "Whatever. It obviously needs a lot of work, and the fuel efficiency of a model like this is appalling. I have some ideas I've been working on for how to reconstruct the powertrain and some theories about improving the combustion quality of the..."

John wandered away as Rodney planned, walking around the car and steadfastly avoiding the predatory gaze of Jimbo, the sport-jacketed, hair-greased sales half of Jimbo and Jenkin's Classic Used Cars.

"Like what you see, boy?" Jimbo asked, grinning around his cigar.

It was June in Corpus Christi. The air smelled like ocean spray and gasoline. Ten feet away Rodney was saying something about rocket launchers and jet engine adaptations and passenger eject mechanisms. The car was a 1970 Chevrolet Monte Carlo SS 454, cherry red, original engine and rebuilt transmission, gleaming in the hot Texas sun.

"Not bad," John said.

Jimbo's grin grew wider.

-

He was two weeks back from Ramstein and holed up in a shitty motel on Colfax when somebody knocked on the door. Assuming it was housekeeping -- he hadn't left the room in twenty-four hours except to get more ice -- he opened up without thinking.

The man had a neatly-trimmed beard and a pleasant smile and a clerical collar. "Major John Sheppard?"

"Not anymore," John said, and slammed the door.

He slid the chain into place and went back to the bed, fell face-forward and slept until twilight. When he woke up there were dark clouds rolling over the mountains and the Denver news stations were calling for snow. White Christmas and all that. John grabbed his jacket and wallet and headed for the door. Chinese takeout, a bottle of Jack Daniels and a shark marathon on Animal Planet -- it was a plan, he supposed, more ambition than he'd felt in weeks.

Two steps outside and he realized the man in the clerical collar was still there in the parking lot, leaning against a dull brown Honda. The first flurries of snow speckled his dark jacket and his expression was simple, serene.

"Did his eyes turn black?" the man asked, pushing away from the car.

John stopped cold and there is was: punch to the gut, ice water over his head, air sucked out of him, all at once, cold and hard and painful like it hadn't ever gone away, and he saw her, pretty little Afghan girl with dead golden eyes and bruises on her face, cowering in the corner of a room that smelled like blood and piss and fear, and _him_ \-- _good man, good commander, never done anything like before, no sir, not him_ \-- towering like the nightmare of an angry god -- _like he was possessed, sir_ \-- his hands dripping red and his eyes black as beetle shells, glittering in the candlelight.

"Who are you?" John asked evenly, swallowing the memory and avoiding the man's eyes. "What do you want?"

"My name's Jim Murphy," the man said, offering his hand. "I've got a few friends in the service who let me know when a problem like yours crops up."

_A problem like mine_, John thought. He somehow doubted that problems like his were all that common in the United State Air Force, at least in the part of the Air Force that existed outside of military hospital psych wards.

"What do you want?" he asked again, ignoring Jim Murphy's proffered hand and going for a little menace in his tone. "Is this the part where you offer to tell me all about good and evil in the world? Sorry, Father, but I've got that all figured--"

"No," Jim Murphy interrupted smoothly. "This is the part where I offer to teach you how to kill those sons-of-bitches so the next one doesn't get away."

About a dozen different replies shuffled through John's head, from _thanks, but no thanks_ to _guess this means you're just as crazy as I am_, but he finally settled on, "Kill what?"

Jim Murphy smiled. "I think you already know."

Reluctantly, John nodded.

"Come on," Jim said, nodding toward the car. "I'll buy you a drink."

-

"Nothing so dramatic as that," Rodney said. "You're the one who provides all the gossip mill fodder."

"I try," John replied, and he waited.

It was August in Baton Rouge and John was lying on his stomach, thanks to a poltergeist who thought it would be a real kick to grab his ankles and drag him down a staircase. Every inch of his back still felt every corner of every step, but the air conditioner was working, the bed wasn't half bad, and Rodney was a warm and solid bulk beside him.

"It was my parents," Rodney went on.

John said nothing. He knew this story; he'd heard it before, never at all once but in bits and pieces stuck in with the million other things Rodney talked about: _there's a graveyard two towns over that's been desecrated twice in the last month and, huh, interesting, it has the same name as the one where my parents are buried_ and _the newspaper says the kids came home and found their parents dead -- well, I know what that's like, let me find out what else the police report says_ and _no sign of forced entry, no fingerprints, no DNA, just like when my -- right, well, if we leave now we'll get there in time for dinner, and there's that restaurant with those incredible burgers, remember?_

"My sister and I woke up -- Saturday morning, we were supposed to leave for summer camp that day and I was so angry about it. I knew they were only sending us away because they didn't want us around, and I hated having to spend the summer surrounded by oversized teenaged gorillas with IQs in the single digits being herded about by cloned counselors who all shared a lifelong goal of using violent competitions to set the evolution of the human race back a few million years--" Rodney broke off with a quiet laugh. "Just like I used to think you were," he added, and even without turning his head John knew that he was smiling in that smug, amused way.

"You know how I feel about evolution," John replied sleepily.

The thing was, they'd been doing it backwards. Any normal pair of people was supposed to meet, get to know each other, learn to like each other, and maybe later, if the stars were all aligned and nobody broke any mirrors, they would get into that whole deal of words that start with _l_ and declarations that sound like _I'd die for you_ and arguing daily over who snores more.

"But we were up and waiting for hours, packed and ready to go, and Jeannie was starting to whine that we would miss our bus, so I went upstairs to wake up Mom and Dad..." Rodney's voice trailed off, and John felt a pang of guilt for the tiny but unmistakable voice in his head that whispered, _Ah, so this is it. The one thing in existence he doesn't want to talk about._

"And you found them," John said.

"Yeah."

But the two of them, a couple of fuck-up drop-outs from normal society whose idea of a Friday night good time was hanging out in a graveyard waiting for zombies to kill, they had been going about it the wrong way all along. They'd started fighting side by side before they knew anything about each other -- hell, it wasn't until a month later when they were chased out of a haunted house by a ghost wielding a hockey stick did John even know that Rodney was Canadian -- because creeping into the dark with somebody you don't know is better than going in alone, and they'd started fucking because there are only so many long showers and lonely waitresses you can take before you just need somebody who understands that sometimes gunpowder and adrenaline and blood and sex are the only things that set you apart from the monsters in the shadows, the only things that make you _alive_.

"There wasn't any blood," Rodney said. "They were just lying there, side by side, staring at the ceiling. The autopsy showed later that their hearts were gone -- did I ever tell you that? Well, that's what was so weird about it. Not a mark on them, not even so much as a paper-cut, and their hearts were gone. I didn't -- all the psychiatrists and grief counselors and other idiots they shuffled us around to afterward, they all kept talking about 'denial,' telling me it was okay if I didn't believe it, that was normal. But I _didn't_. I mean, I never didn't believe it. I knew they were dead. I could feel it -- there was still something there, in the room. Something _wrong._"

And somewhere along the line, maybe around about the time they passed an eight hour stakeout waiting for ghouls who never showed by debating the relative merits and weaknesses of Batman and Wonder Woman, maybe they actually started to like each other.

"I didn't tell anybody that, of course," Rodney went on. "The police had a hard enough time wrapping their puny little minds around the fact that I probably wasn't a maladjusted sociopathic murderer just because I liked physics better than people. After a while I almost convinced myself that I had imagined it."

John pushed himself up on his elbows and looked at Rodney. "What changed your mind?"

"When I was a graduate student, a professor at MIT died the same way," Rodney explained. "Not a mark on him, but his heart was gone, and there was this undergrad in the mechanical engineering department who attracted a lot of attention to himself spreading theories about demons and evil spirits."

Narrowing his eyes, John asked suspiciously, "Does that mean we have _Ash_ to thank for the fact that you're not living the life of a pocket-protector geek scribbling equations in a cubicle at NASA?"

Grinning, Rodney waved his hand dismissively. "Buy him a beer next time you see him if you want to show your gratitude. Besides, I know NASA would have given me at least an office. A corner office with large windows and a fancy coffee maker and a hot blonde secretary who understood the basic principles of quantum mechanics."

"Thank god you escaped that fate," John muttered, lying back down on the flat motel pillow.

"I still have no idea what it was," Rodney said after a few moments of silence. "I promised Jeannie I'd find it. She thinks I'm crazy."

_We will find it_, John thought, _and we'll kill it._

But he remained quiet. Some promises meant more when they didn't have to be said aloud.

-

In January, John went with Jim Murphy to Minnesota. He memorized Latin exorcism rituals, learned about the many exciting, magical properties of table salt, and met a dozen or so grizzled, cynical men in plaid shirts and steel-toed boots, men who lived in their cars and trucks and slept with their weapons in hand, buying their coffee and whiskey with cash that was begged, borrowed, or stolen, chasing shadows just beneath the surface of the land, bleeding in a battlefield that wasn't supposed to exist.

"Two months, you fucking pansy flyboy," a old-timer called Bud Hallet said one night, laughing at John over a hand of poker. "It ain't exactly like dropping bombs from a mile up. You gotta smell the blood to do this job, kid."

Two months later Bud Hallet was dead, surprised by a vengeful spirit with an ice pick and a grudge to settle, and John was in Omaha, trying to track whatever it was that was grabbing little kids off playgrounds and slicing them up. He didn't have anything to go on, no clues except a pile of tiny bodies and too many weeping parents, and everywhere he looked it seemed like he only saw his own ignorance staring back at him.

So he called Jim Murphy, and the first thing Jim did was laugh out loud. "You just lost me fifty bucks, Sheppard."

"What?"

"When you tore out of here, I bet Jefferson it would take you at least six months, probably longer, to admit that you needed a little more help than you were patient enough to accept."

Rather than trying to wrap his mind around what Jim meant, John said, "Look, I just want to know, do you have any idea what this thing--"

"You got a pen and paper? I'm going to give you some directions." Jim rattled off a long list of roads and turns, and John scribbled them down obediently.

"A bar," he said when Jim was finished. "You want me to go to a bar."

"I've heard some folks talking about a fellow who's been working out a way to hijack security cameras and other surveillance tech to track that thing in Omaha, whatever it is," Jim explained. "Something that moves that fast and leaves no trail, well, seems to me you need a bit more than your own two feet to find it."

"And this guy..."

"Go to the roadhouse, John," Jim said gently. "You can argue with me later."

-

"Everyone warned me you were crazy," Rodney said one day, apropos of nothing, as they were eating lunch at an IHOP near Boston.

Outside the window strip-mall concrete was framed by the glorious colors of autumn in New England, and it took a few seconds for Rodney's words to sink in.

"What?" He paused with a spoonful of soup halfway to his mouth. "Crazy?"

"You know," Rodney said, waving his fork dangerously. "Mentally unstable war vet dishonorably discharged for trying to kill his demon-possessed commanding officer, hiding a violent streak and a death wish behind a cool demeanor that fools nobody."

John set his spoon down. "They said that?" He suddenly felt really, really slow for being surprised by this revelation, which, he suspected, was exactly why Rodney was telling him. "They actually used the words 'cool demeanor'?"

"When they were being nice," Rodney said around a mouthful of omelette, "or worried that you would shoot them."

-

"Bloody lunatics, the both of you. It's a miracle ye haven't been killed yet."

John slumped into the old sofa, hot mug of tea in hand, and closed his eyes. He could still feel the steering wheel of the Monte Carlo vibrating under his fingers, hear the roar of the engine surrounding him. It was July in Idaho, they'd had the car for just under a month, and John had just learned that it could, in fact, travel over a hundred and fifty miles at a steady ninety miles per hour.

"But he'll be okay," the doctor said, softening his tone a bit. "Lost a bit of blood, but he'll be on the mend before long."

"Yeah," John said, his voice hoarse. "Thanks."

"Don't let it happen again, lad."

He didn't know Beckett's story -- sometimes, he thought, it was better not to know whether the rumors about the veterinarian who performed genetic experiments on barnyard animals were true, especially not when the vet in question was the man sewing Rodney's guts back inside where they belonged. All he knew was that the man stitched people up without asking too many questions, scolded them like a fussy mother hen, and sent them on their way. In a world where most people's medical coverage meant a needle and thread and a Bic lighter, a kindly Scottish doctor who also happened to be a mad scientist was barely a blip on the radar.

Sometimes, John thought, the big picture didn't matter all that much.

He opened his eyes and stood up too quickly, swaying a little bit with the sudden motion. "I want to see him."

"He's not awake," Beckett said, grabbing John's arm to steady him. "And you're a bloody mess -- literally."

John glanced down. His hands, forearms, shirt and jeans were streaked with blood and dirt, oil and sawdust. Haunted fucking paper mill. Never again.

"Go on, then," Beckett said, steering him toward the back of the house. "Get yourself cleaned up, then I'll let you into the surgery."

"Right. Okay. Yeah."

Being clean was good. Not as good as being alive, but it was important to keep things in perspective.

-

It was November and they were hunting unruly werewolves in Oregon when they heard that Jim Murphy was dead. Sliced across the throat and bled out right in his own church, surrounded by guns and knives and spells of protection.

John hung up his cell phone and dropped it on the bed. "Laney says something big is happening." She'd been crying, barely able to choke the words out, another one of the lost strays Jim took in when nobody else in the world would believe what she had seen and heard.

"Do you believe that?" Rodney was sitting on the bed, laptop on his legs, his expression skeptical.

A year ago, John had been on a flight somewhere between Kabul and Ramstein, handcuffed to his hospital bed even though he was unconscious, surrounded by young men with machine guns slung over their shoulders and old men who whispered and wondered behind locked doors.

"I don't know," he replied. "Maybe."

A year ago, he had believed that the only evil in the world was what men made for themselves.

"The frequency of demonic possessions does seem to be increasing," Rodney said thoughtfully. He began to type quickly, his eyes darting across the screen. "Of course, it's hard to say for sure, not having any reliable method of reporting and verifying the occurrences or a trustworthy historical record to use as a statistical baseline, but we can still extrapolate from the temporal and geographical distribution of possessions whether or not this is an actual trend or merely a function of hysteria-induced perception..."

John walked over to the window, half-listening, and pushed the curtain aside.

Need a bit more than your own two feet, Jim had said.

_Thank you, Jim,_ John thought, watching the rain fall. _Good advice._


End file.
